


This, Too, Shall Pass

by tBrilli4ntD4rkness



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Comfort and Fluff, Dealing with post traumatic stress, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, M/M, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:40:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25218661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tBrilli4ntD4rkness/pseuds/tBrilli4ntD4rkness
Summary: You won't need me forever, but I'll still be hereFor we all have our nightmares, even me, my dearThe kids and surviving trolls may have grown up and won the game that ended their respective worlds, but that doesn't mean they've ever forgotten it. Some experience it more vividly than others.
Relationships: John Egbert & Dirk Strider, John Egbert/Dirk Strider, Referenced/Implied Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Rose Lalonde & Original Lalonde-Maryam Child(ren), Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	This, Too, Shall Pass

**Author's Note:**

> *Laments* Can't even listen to music anymore without being struck with an idea
> 
> From this lyricstuck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS7bohPQ0V4

Rose was never quite sure what awakened her in the middle of nights like these, some creak in the house settling, or the lack thereof, but she did know perfectly well why she couldn't return to sleep. The weight of staticky silence pressed in on her ears and the low light swirled the room before her eyes until it felt like she was being swallowed in them both, torrents of nothingness being shoved through her ears and eyes and nose and down her throat until she had to force herself to move, to sit up and hear the soft noise the mattress made, to calm her heart.

As always, Kanaya was still asleep beside her, curled peacefully under the blankets with her hair falling across the pillow. The troll hadn't been fully nocturnal since her death and the subsequent surfacing of her rainbow drinker abilities, which meant that aside from overworking themselves or being called in suddenly to assist the mother grub, Rose and Kanaya were in sync. It was comforting to wake up to her wife's face or at the sound of her cooking in the other room with breakfast smells dissipating throughout the house, and to know there would be someone beside her if ever they woke to fend off an intruder - not that it was likely to happen, but having played the game now made her consider things like that.

Though she teased her brother about it back on the meteor, and would probably continue to do so for the rest of their conditionally immortal lives, she understood intimately why Dave and Karkat rotated through their horrendous sleep schedules together - had done so since only a few weeks after they met in person, slowly adjusting closer together even if they continued to bicker over every little thing at all hours.

Rose flicked a switch to turn the fan on, listening as the slight ambient noise provided something to listen to besides her own head. Still, it would be a while before she was able to return to sleep, and her throat was a little dry, so Rose padded into the kitchen on quiet feet to fill herself a glass of water.

She watched the clear liquid stream into her cup, gauging how full it was by the light of the electric weather pad on the counter, and when she raised it to her lips the world came back into focus a little more as her body remembered how to function. The first sip turned into several long gulps, as though she'd been bodily craving water without realizing it since she'd gone to sleep. Rose closed her eyes and savored the way the cool liquid ran down her esophagus, trailing pleasant chill through her chest as it did so. Technically, Rose could go a very long time without eating or drinking, she and Kanaya both, but after a sweep and a half of alchemized food every natural flavor was a wonder of its own.

Fighting a universe-destroying game for many of her formative years had made Rose cherish the simple things.

Rose remembered the feeling of looking into the depths of starless space, vast and unknowable, as the meteor sped along. Except for the centrifugal force she felt under her feet and the logic of having watched Sollux and Aradia blast them off, the entire complex very well could have been floating aimlessly for all that she could tell. She remembered meeting Roxy, so at home with the living uncertainty or at least unconcerned by it, that was the antithesis of everything Rose's aspect craved. Void and Light, destined never to meet, by paradoxical nature that to know the unknowable was for the unknown to no longer exist, and remain uncomprehended.

It had brought new meaning to Nietzsche's aphorism, "Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that they do not become a monster in the process. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." Because watching the unseeable expanse of unblemished nothingness, neither dark nor light, rolling by, Rose was reminded of another life in which she had stared into the void until the void gazed back, and the wrapping, clinging darkness of eldritch gods that had come out of it after their proverbial eyes met. The whispers that had grown louder until her mind melted and her ears bled with their will--

"Momma?" A young voice asked behind her.

Rose turned to see her daughter pointing a flashlight at the ceiling so that the light filtered around the room, blanketing everything in a faint haze instead of a single pool of brightness in the gloom.

"Did you have a dream?" Rose asked, setting her glass down. How long had she just been standing there?

The little girl nodded, horns bobbing in the light. "It was kinda scary, but I don't know why."

What frightened Rose more than anything was the illogical worry that her children would somehow share her curse. Seer/Mage abilities, and classpects as a whole, could not be inherited through genetics or nurture directly. They were a product of personality and possibility, and unless another session was formed on this world - which it shouldn't be, not for several thousand years at least, from which Rose summoned all the relief she could because Skaia could not be controlled and she wasn't sure that she could force herself to fight it again in her world's stead, especially after peace for so long - anything that was there wouldn't be awakened. Terezi, Sollux, and Rose would not be responsible for another generation of eternally frustrated visionaries that foresaw many things but for those that were most important, could never really change the field anyway.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" Rose patted her daughter's hair in soothing motions, and was rewarded with a faint purr. Rose's human body's limitations had never felt so great as after she and Kanaya had adopted a grub, and she would forever wish she could emulate the sounds that poured so easily from her beloved's throat and chest.

"Maybe, 'm tired. I was gonna go sleep with you and <Mom>, but I saw you in here," her daughter replies, using the Alternian suffix for a female lusus' name. They hadn't taught her very much Alternian yet aside from a few everyday words, though this one had been in use since she was old enough to speak after her first molt to differentiate between her mothers. Rose imagined that someday, when her Alternian was more extensive and precise, it would throw some people for a loop to hear her drop 'Momma' or 'Mother' midsentence in reference to Rose. "If you rub my hair though, I'll prao'ly pass out?"

Smiling at the phrasing, Rose returned, "Alright. Shall we?"

She placed an arm over the girl's shoulder, letting her daughter lead her down the hall to whichever room she pleased and smiling when she took hold of her hand in her own smaller one. They passed Rose and Kanaya's bedroom, the faint sounds of the troll sleep-chirring from inside, and continued down the hall, flashlight ever pointed at the ceiling.

Rose's daughter clambered onto her bed, light bouncing erratically around the room as she shifted to get comfortable, and tugged Rose down beside her without hesitation. Curled at her daughter's back, hand on her hair, Rose was reminded of her days as a grub when she had slept with Kanaya and Rose. Neither of them had known much about raising children aside from books, theories about the Dolorosa, and human cultural osmosis, and neither had felt comfortable leaving their daughter to spend every night alone especially with the memories of the endless empty meteor licking at their heels. Considering that Kanaya's whole species collectively hadn't raised a grub since the Signless, they must not have been entirely wrong.

Rose remembered one study in particular she'd read that had taken place on old Earth, comparing how western influenced families tended to leave their children in cribs alone, and how shocked humans from other cultural regions had been; she vividly recalled one aghast woman, when informed that neither parent slept next to a child, asking, "But someone else is with them, right?" The words had rung a little too close to the old soft ache where Rose's mother had once lived and died. Alone in a mansion for most of her childhood, her ectobiological scratched-universe parents much the same, and her brother worse than that . . she wouldn't be the same. Kanaya's own relatively pleasant childhood, tended by and tending to a guardian that cared even if she was of a different and linguistically incompatible species.

They had both vowed when they'd begun to make Earth C a better world than either of theirs had been, and the most important way was through its future generations. Someday the original players' children would no longer be so dependent on their parents, and with hope and a little optimism would outgrow their forebears' faults as well. Given that was more Jake's field, but Rose was coming to understand that not everything had to be hinged on the 'right' set of paths. What she Saw was not uncomforting itself either; only time would tell whether Earth C's eternal guardians would eventually hold its development back or not.

"Momma, do you ever have strange dreams?" The question came slurred, like she was already on the verge of sleep.

Rose's hand was slowed by memory, even as she shoved the details out of her mind. "We all have our nightmares, even me, my dear." It felt like an admission and yet disingenuous at once.

Her daughter accepted her statement though, and shortly her soft breathing was restful with unconsciousness. Rose adjusted herself and rolled to her feet, careful not to disturb the sproingy humanish mattress. She paused to click the flashlight off, and then again in the hall.

It was still dark out and in the house, but Rose could Feel exactly when the sun would start to rise. In her mind's eye she Saw its careful appearance and the tedious extermination of shadows as it slowly rose; she Knew the way its rays would filter in the hall better than any species' conceived nightlight. She left her daughter's bedroom door open as she returned to Kanaya's side.

* * *

Sunlight flashing over sea and bright lines of metal, no, moonlight falling on crashing waves and highlighting the treacherously slick danger made by rain, no, nothingness, vast and indescribably terrible and broken but for the faint light of dream bubbles in all their hues, beauty and horror interchanged as easily as the flipping sides of a falling coin. A dull flash of pain and the sharp fear of watching himself die, in opposition of how things had truly gone down. Empty and hollow and roiling with too many conflictions to count.

Dirk felt a different kind of awareness fall over him, the instinctual fear of fighting something he wasn't entirely sure the nature of and knowing even as he did that he could not win, stinging pain flooding a few of the major places he'd been injured or from which he'd been killed over the years. The border between wakefulness and dreamworld was a quick slide edged with thorns of relief and panic. He woke with his eyes closed and holding himself coiled still but it was not from the years of self-control he'd etched into his body, rather an irrational fear that he couldn't quite shake that everything was real once again.

Slowly, Dirk opened his eyes, hardly daring to blink until his night vision had confirmed the inky blackness around him to be clear of threats. He eyed the doorway from where he lay on his side facing it, a habit he had yet to break, and the hole to the unknown represented by the rest of his house. It was utterly absurd and Dirk knew it; even in the brain-rending plot switchbacks and double-crosses that had been his life in the game reality had never been as out of touch to him as it was now, laying under a blanket on the world he'd helped to create. As long as he didn't move, whatever might or might not exist didn't know that he was aware of himself and it, the warm presence at his back was still safe and not his only partner in a dystopia. It was Pandora's box, Schrödinger's doorway, Pascal's wager with reality that there was no race of space-faring zombies come in through his kitchen skylight.

A tic was slowly building in his back from laying so wound up in the previously loose position he'd woken up in. Dirk twisted as slightly as he dared to alleviate it, and failing that, stretched his leg out fully as slowly as he could against the increasingly painful sensation. Feeling incrementally more in control of reality and logically remembering that he could rip people's souls out if need be - as long as zombies had souls that remained uncorrupted by the virus - Dirk stiffly reached a hand out to his bedside table for his phone.

Back on his doubly apocalypsed Earth, Dirk had had a series of songs - chosen from what was still available in the limited but still vast pickings on YouTube - that he listened to in situations like these. Not his playlist for when he couldn't sleep, that was different, but half a dozen songs he'd found one night in the wake of a dream about his bro's death at the hands of the Condesce. He would search each one up individually in the same order he'd found them, the monotony of the light sounds his fingers made on the screen calming, and slowly his heartrate would return to normal as he listened. Marina's Immortal was the first; the irony of the words "If I could buy forever at a price, I would buy it twice," were not lost on him now, when it seemed all he'd done in the game was die, die for his friends, die for himself, and even godtiered he knew he'd do it again without a second thought of the risk of the Heroic/Just balance being tipped out of his favor if the need arose. Which, why was he so concerned about home invaders to begin with then? A shift in the sheets. Oh right.

Dirk's hand closed on empty air and he felt his heart seize involuntarily. He'd left the thing on its charger, which wasn't here because John was always going on about WiFi and brainwaves, to which Dirk duly reminded him that he (and Hal) had managed without extracellular fluid damage while living in an apartment with approximately a hundred signals pinging around at all times. Then again, Hal's voice had chased away all the sanity in Dirk several times over, so if creating an AI based on yourself could be considered brain-trauma-induced actions, the effects might not be negligible.

Trying to breathe deeply and remind himself that the phone wasn't that important, he could deal sleeplessly for the rest of the night or _just go get it in a little while_ , Dirk moved himself into a slouching half-sitting half-horizontal position. He held his chin in one hand, phalanges along his jaw, and his pulse was quick and shallow beneath his fingertips. Dirk nearly jumped out of his skin when a hand touched his spine.

He knew better than talk to Dirk when he was like this, at least, it was always that telltale suppressed flinch, massaging calming circles into his back until Dirk's paralysis wore off enough that he relaxed.

"So," John voiced, sounding more awake than was good for Dirk's guilt complex. It was the most laughably open-ended of statements, and John's go-to way of testing the waters. The corner of Dirk's lips twitched up because _John_ could make anything sound awkward even when he wasn't trying.

"Memories of the game in an amalgamated mess as usual," Dirk replied, his blank voice colored even to his own ears.

Tucking his chin onto Dirk's shoulder, John hummed in sympathy. The added contact was nice, it always was, and yet Dirk's primal brain still managed to constantly forget how much he loved John's cuddles, so he was pleasantly surprised quite often. Dirk stretched back - John always called him supine like a cat - so that his head was resting at the juncture between John's shoulder and chest, adam's apple exposed when it bobbed in a swallow.

Even in the quiet and darkness, or perhaps because of it, Dirk felt unspeakably vulnerable. All of him - physically, emotionally, even the parts that devolved into his splinter selves - had been laid bare for this boy time and again, and John could decide at any point that he was too much, always too much, and leave him alone in the dark with his demons to eat themselves alive. John would be absolutely justified in doing so, too. Yet he wrapped his arms around Dirk's midriff instead and reassured him with his presence that it didn't matter if they were both living repressed issues reservoirs, or that Dirk was a certifiable danger to himself and others (as the pale band of scarring about his neck attested), because for some unfathomable reason John was emotionally attached to this mess of a human.

Dirk didn't always have the right way to express it, usually didn't, really, but he appreciated John more than a handful of paltry words could articulate. Funny, for all the long hours sitting by himself on an island of metal, whiling away the boredom between drone attacks by reading everything he and later Hal could bring up from the depths of the internet, he still hadn't found a way to bring the concepts of his mind out into the air. They would always be diminished by his words. _Agape, pragma, philautia, ludus_ \- the Greeks had separated their love better than most humans and trolls had picked theirs apart completely into neat boxes, but even after tens of thousands of years no society had taught its descendants a better way to verbalize their bonds than with a too-casual three word phrase.

So he did the best he could between his own limitations and the inherent ones from a physical form lacking telepathic communication. Dirk replied to John's comfort with a hand of his own, resting feather-light on the pulse-points on the side of his face. He could feel the steady continuity of John's heart through his temple as he blinked languidly back at Dirk, the flicker of his eyelashes covering and revealing his cobalt irises just visible in the low light. Blood had never been Dirk's aspect, but sometimes he wondered what it would be like to see its intangible connections as Karkat might. Closing his eyes, Dirk let himself appreciate the moment.

Remnants of his dreams resurfaced across the back of his eyelids. The desolate emptiness of the end of a universe dissolving into its pixels; his position evoking the memory of a sword struck through his chest in a life that wasn't his. Things he couldn't possibly have experienced, yet saw through whatever laws of Skaia that remained around to torment him.

Dirk's eyes flew open again, a sudden deep breath already halfway into his lungs. John appeared startled, then melancholy - resigned but ongoing worry for what they could not be rid of. He folded Dirk closer, blocking his vision of the doorway.

This time it didn't take as long for Dirk's quick pulse to slow as warm hands soothed him. Sixteen years above an ocean of endless blue virtually alone had made it so that he would never take the comfort of being held for granted.

"You want to listen to some music?" John asked after a while.

Given that was most likely a common reaction to night terrors, but Dirk still felt understood in a way that he appreciated. Still, he twisted to give John a look of suspicion. "Don't tell me you're storing your phone in here when I'm not allowed to."

John's face scrunched with petulant guilt. "I forgot to take it out of my pants' pocket, it's not a regular thing."

"Hypocrite." Dirk leaned over the edge of the bed, reaching for where John had dropped his day wear on the floor as usual. He had to stretch most of his upper body precariously before he could snag a hem with his fingertips, anchoring himself with his toes under John's legs.

"If you fall off because you're too lazy to get up, I'm not going to catch you." They both knew that wasn't true - at least not in this context. Trying to get Dirk off-balance was fair game most of the time, but John wouldn't pawn him off to the floor right now.

"It's called efficiency." Unable to make heads or tails of the wadded up, half inside-out material, Dirk shook it until something weighty enough to be a device dropped beside him, and then tossed it down to the foot of the bed. "Like you wouldn't use your retcon abilities instead."

John's eyes visibly lit and he grinned. "Oh yeah, zappy powers!"

Rolling his eyes with a small not-exactly-smirk, Dirk proffered the device to John for unlocking. Purely for the civility aspect of it - Dirk had learned all of John's passwords fairly quickly, and had given his own patterns and passwords in return. John didn't bother to take it, letting (forcing) Dirk hold to it with his less steady right arm while he poked around on the screen.

After a moment, he looked to Dirk. "What do you want to hear? I have a whole Celtic station on Pandora, or we can put my playlists on shuffle, but I wouldn't recommend that because I'm pretty sure some of Dave's raps ended up on there." John made a face. "He did something to my Christmas station the last time he was over here, too, and now I'm fighting jazz songs every fifteen minutes. I only get three thumbs-down an hour!"

Since human holidays had become crossed with troll ones, and the vast majority were in fact no longer well represented by eight humans, listening to traditional music out of season was a normal occurrence. Really, the only festivals that had carried over with great enthusiasm across Earth C were Diwali and Holi - though the latter festival of color was worrisomely chaotic in Carapacian districts.

"Probably added to your list of seed songs - I made a similar mistake once. When your station is just the same two dozen songs over and over by a handful of artists, though, I'd think anything else would be an improvement." Dirk smirked. John gave him a dramatically offended face, hand over his heart.

Under normal sleepless conditions, Dirk wouldn't have minded the potential to hear a Dave Strider rap or six; he'd helped make a couple of them himself, and back before the game he'd scrounged up his long dead Bro's songs as working music. Right now, though, there was only one ritual for his shot nerves.

He turned the phone around and navigated to the right place, knowing exactly what thumbnail to scan for. Earth C's internet had been largely reconstructed by Hal, minus the types of content the AI had deemed unsuitable for the nearly minted world. Which meant that Earth C had access to enormous quantities of data which technically shouldn't exist, having been uploaded, arranged, and collected by billions of users who had never existed in this iteration of a universe, but temporal paradoxes were a minor price for gods who just wanted the same plethora of idiocy they'd had access to growing up instead of building it all again from scratch.

"What are you searching up?" John peered at his fingers curiously, trying to read the screen upside down. (Dirk knew he couldn't.)

He rather wanted John to understand the importance of this music to him, though. Dirk didn't pause in his scrolling for the right video of Immortal as he answered, "On old Earth I had a series of songs that I'd search up whenever I needed to . . calm down, you know, since the waves were never 'lulling' or any of the other adjectives tropey writers describe them as. It's almost habit at this point, although I'm sure Rose would have plenty to say about my choice of psychological vices." He glanced up at John, finger poised over the video, to catch his reaction.

John's face shifted quickly through a triptych of sadness and understood loneliness. The slight draw of his eyebrows shared Dirk's old pain. Dirk nodded once to himself, just a twitch of his head, and allowed one edge of his mouth to curl in a wry smile as he pressed play. John listened without comment and Dirk closed his eyes to rest his head on one crooked elbow.

"You can make another playlist on my account, I don't mind," John offered after the song had ended and Dirk's fingers were pattering in the next.

Dirk flopped his head back instead of shrugging one shouldered in his current position. "It's not just about convenience - the muscle memory of finding them each time is part of it."

If he ever found one of those ancient song videos vanished into the electronic metatext between sessions, he'd probably flip outright. No, actually, he would. Even with their constant bickering and passive aggressive mutual sabotage, Hal had never erased anything on YouTube, despite having no qualms about doing away with Dirk's downloaded songs or connection to the defunct internet on multiple occasions.

John smiled back at him, a secret in his expression that made Dirk blink and scramble to decode. "Yeah, well, not all of us have a perfect sequence memory. _I_ don't want to forget the order."

Something cliché and warm found where Dirk's Heart should be, his metaphorical aspect one, and set up shop there. He passed the phone over to John to mess with and it if he hadn't been reading so intently, he wouldn't have caught the playlist title "dirk's dream re-covery" before it converted to a code akin to the language of horrorterrors.

Dirk stretched out again, obtusely watching the screen because blue light wouldn't affect his insomnia more than anything else. The typical clamor arose in his head - he should face the door to watch it, but if something did come through it he wanted his body to be between John and the etherworld, but he also didn't particularly want to turn away from John right now either - and for once was quieted again by the calming and random assortment of music. John flipped around and tugged at Dirk's arms, insisting on being held as a spoon, contrary to their usual positioning. Dirk puffed a chuckle that was only denoted by the set of sharp exhalations. He moved his temple across John's forearm, as if he wasn't enough of a cat already.

He closed his eyes and envisioned the sounds of the music painting themselves across the tinted darkness until they began to form organically without his input. Dances and battles of color conquered each other in cyclical sweeps, never quite the same as the differences blended together. The words in his mind strung sentences of strange dream logic, brewed by feelings of contentment - John was here, next to him, and spread out across his, _his_ world were more friend-family than all the people he'd known during his childhood. Dirk actually, truly, wasn't alone.

**Author's Note:**

> (As an experiment, I'm curious how many people actually listen to writer-recommended music while they read. So, the current views on said lyricstuck are 7136..)
> 
> (Will edit in a week or so)
> 
> (Edit 9/16: Did I say a week? I meant a month and change. Total is 7198, though the experiment has been thoroughly invalidated after so long, I'm sure.)


End file.
